The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Surrealism began as an artistic movement in the 1920s. Here painters like Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Rene Magritte and not long after writers and filmmakers sought to challenge traditional naturalism by the use of a series of non-sequitur juxtapositions.
The idea was initially to allow the subconscious free reign and break away from realism. Surrealism specialises in non-logical connections, juxtaposition of objects and images that do not match, where symbolism is often made literal, or the absurd and nonsensical are allowed free reign. On film, surrealism will often break with traditional narrative or treat the ridiculous with deadpan seriousness.
Surrealism began on film with early works during the 1920s from Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel. There has been no real movement for surrealist cinema as such, more a case of individual works and directors who specialise in it. Noted surrealist directors include Robert Altman, Quentin Dupieux, Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Gondry, Peter Greenaway, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Charles Kaufman, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Takashi Miike, Bill Plympton, The Quay Brothers and Jan Svankmajer.
As the title suggests, this is cryptic. Chloe Pirrie wanders off in the woods, encounters a mysterious Bigfoot creature and afterwards experiences a baffling identity exchange
A surrealist film from the rapper known as Flying Lotus that consists of random plotless weirdness without any coherent rationale beyond serving up one gross-out effect after another
An extraordinary work from the French New Wave filled with incredible visuals as lovers drift through an ornate hotel where memory and time itself seems to shift
A surreal very Lynchian French film in which a deranged Charlotte Rampling shoots herself and then afterwards appears to possess Laurent Lucas’s wife Charlotte Gainsbourg
Cryptic and baffling Jim Jarmusch film with Isaach De Bankole as a mysterious assassin who passes through a series of enigmatic and surreal conversations
A bafflingly surreal yet compulsive David Lynch film in which Bill Pullman and wife receives mysterious threatening videotapes and Bill then inexplicably turns into Balthazar Getty
A Finnish art project that consists of five episodes that subjectively depict stories of women with mental illness with strikingly surreal effect
A film from Czech animator Jan Svankmajer film, loosely based on an Edgar Allan Poe story, about the surreal happenings at an asylum where the lunatics have taken over
Phil Tippett, creator of effects on Star Wars and Jurassic Park, creates a unique, unclassifiable stop-motion animated film set in an industrial nightmare world
From Paul Thomas Anderson, a series of interlinking stories and character sketches, featuring some great performances. Underlining everything is a fascination with the inexplicable and the works of Charles Fort
Melies Cinemagician is a special screening of a selection of films from Georges Melies presented by Vancouver’s Vancity Theater to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The show was a live performance involving a score composed especially for the event, displays of conjuring tricks and a magic lantern show. The same year also saw […]
Adaptation of a Doris Lessing novel set in a collapsing future England. Nicely portrayed but crytpically surreal touches end up baffling
An anime from Satoshi Kon that tells the story of an actress and become a surreal journey through Japanese cinematic history
Anime based on an autobiographical manga that leaps off into a variety of styles and comes filled with madcap surrealistic visuals
After the disastrous misstep of The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry returns to the surreal whimsy of The Science of Sleep. A film where Gondry delights in scene after scene of visual nonsense and serving up all the appealingly capricious silliness he can muster – creativity for creativity’s sake alone
A film about strange happenings at a mission where all the characters may be reincarnations. A film of the hippie era that gets lost in mysticism and trippiness
Darren Aronofsky’s surreal drama wildly divided critics and was a box-office flop with general audiences. Naturally, what I thought the film was about was completely different to what Aronofsky stated it was about
David Lynch work of Hollywood noir in which novice actress Naomi Watts (in the role that made her name) is drawn into a surreal idenity blurring mystery. As always with Lynch, this baffling, weird and mesmerising
As might be expected, a collaboration between Werner Herzog and David Lynch makes for an exceedingly strange film, involving matricide, mental illness and ostriches – and all apparently based on a true life murder. Very strange, if in the end it only produces a puzzled scratch of the head
Guy Maddin was hired by the Documentary Channel to make a documentary about his hometown Winnipeg and turns it into a surreal confabulation of fact and tall tale
The Polish Brothers, two of the most underrated creative teams in the US today, make a rather puzzling film about angels that feels like muted Coen Brothers. The film is cool, measured, has often striking imagery but leaves you scratching your head trying to figure out what it is about
Alex van Warmerdam makes a very strange black comedy, so deadpan you are not sure if you are meant to be laughing or not
Hilarious Jan Svankmajer film about a mother who decides to treat a log as a child. Full of blackly funny humour before transforming into a macabre monster movie
Forgotten silent Japanese avant garde classic set in a mental asylum. This has many similarities to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in its shifting perspectives that delve into the subjective mental space of the inmates
Dennis Potter was the greatest writer to ever work in televisio. This mini-series is one of his most celebrated works, featuring characters bursting out into lip-synched Golden Oldie songs, making biting contrast to their downbeaten lives
From Eric Rohmer, a director of the French New Wave, an adaptation of stories from the Arthurian legends, made in a decidedly eccentric style
Chuck Jones, the director of numerous Warner Brothers cartoons, adapts a popular children’s book that comes with a dizzying array of surreal visuals and puns
The second feature film from the Quay Brothers, a bafflingly incomprehensible work of surrealism, strange designs and non-sequitir dialogue
Film version of Pink Floyd’s best-selling album, an extraordinary surreal audiovisual dive into the fraying mind of a rock star
Micro-budgeted early Adam Wingard film that delves into the disturbed mental spaces of a depressed man
Bafflingly surreal film from Andrzej Zulawski in which Isabelle Adjani gives birth to a tentacled monster in a subway. Nobody has any idea what the film is about but it has become a cult work since
Strange, surrealist animation from Spain – the characters are the small, cute talking animals you might encounter in a standard piece of cutsie moppet animation but it exists in a disturbing world that is anything but where characters are plagued by drug addictions, mental illness and police brutality
A man just out of jail leaves his wife after an argument and starts hitch-hiking. And then things start to get really weird
A film from the Pang Brothers in which a heroine enters into an extraordinarily conceived fantasy world that would appear to be taking place in her own imagination
A film from Quentin Dupieux that comes in a series of quirky intersecting stories where the dreams and films different characters are watching/making keeping blurring together in mind-boggling ways
A dark Coming of Age story set in a surreal depiction of the midwest populated by what might be vampires and angels
An extraordinarily stylised homage to the 1960s spy movie, which strips everything down to a series of provocative, stylised high-end fashion poses. The visuals in the film are quite extraordinary
Mind-bogglingly surreal, almost indescribable film from Joel Potrykus as a slacker attempts to complete a videogame sitting on a couch as assorted things including the Y2K apocalypse happen around him
Forget about movie melodrama like A Beautiful Mind , this may be one of the best, most credible films about mental illness … Essentially a surreal animated family history of a Latvian animator, this distils some incredibly bleak anecdotal material with a wittily and biting incisive brilliance
The best budgeted of Guy Maddin’s films, a renaissance of his familiar kitsch surrealism and silent movie homages
Oddly eccentric Swiss comedy about a man who starts to uncontrollably shed sand. Undeniably reminiscent of the superior The Science of Sleep but not without its quirky amusements
Near indescribable mix of horror, hallucination, surrealism and tormented sexuality – quite possibly cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky at his best
James Ivory and Ismail Merchant are usually known for their arthouse works. This is their strangest film where a group of savages discover a mansion and adopt civilised ways
One of the most obscure films in the oeuvre of Steven Soderbergh, a strange and head-scratchingly surreal satire of workplace and domestic life
A Michel Gondry film that blurs the line between dream and reality with hilariously offbeat regard. Gondry indulges his eccentricities to the maximum with quite sublime results
Bizarre stop-motion animated version of the farytale that resembles Gumby that takes place in a surreal Eraserhed-like world
One of the other films from Jim Sharman, director of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a gonzo comedy where alien visitors bring a statue of the Duke of Edinburgh to life
From cult director Abel Ferrara, a film described as being being about the language of dreams in which Willem Dafoe drifts through a series of surreal landscapes searching for the meaning of life
Completely demented Greek film about a mother and daughter imprisoning and torturing people in a big old house
Disastrous Hollywood version of Dennis Potter’s classic tv mini-series where a hospitalised Robert Downey jr fantasises a dream world of 1940s film noir
Surreal and plotless British film based on a radio show about the happenings around a country mansion
From Swedish director Roy Andersson, a series of plotless, surreal vignettes pitched with black humour
David Cronenberg film that subjectively takes place in the mind of mentally ill Ralph Fiennes, a bewildering film with no easy handholds
Czech Claymation animator Jan Svankmajer embraces the Terry Gilliam cutout animation process in this wackily playful mix of dream and surrealism that emerges similar to The Science of Sleep
Mind-bending Charlie Kaufman meta-fiction in which Philip Seymour Hoffman creates a vast theatre project that drags on for years and starts to merge into his own life
Extraordinary Belgian fabulist film, part-animated, part live-action, that takes place in a surreal alternate world
György Pálfi directs an anthology mad up of three stories where the emphasis is on dark, gross-out humour
One of Roman Polanski’s least recognised films in which he both directs and plays the lead as a mousy man driven to a state of paranoia and the point he loses his identity by the neighbours in a Parisian apartment building
Jean Cocteau’s follow-up to his earlier Orpheus becomes an opportunity where Cocteau makes an autobiographical films, revisiting his own life and works
Shinya Tsukamoto makes a better budgeted sequel to his breakthrough hit. The first film was a masterpiece of guerilla filmmaking but the same frenzied fetishism is missing here
Extraordinary directorial debut from Japan’s Shinya Tsukamoto, a frenetic, fetishistic and surreally deranged vision of man-machine fusion that feels like David Lynch having gone away and done a crash reading course of William Gibson
Anarchic French film entirely without dialogue as a group of people in an apartment begin to revert to pre-civilised behaviour
An obscure joke from Alex Cox that has he and Miguel Sandoval as two businessman who go to dinner but keep passing through different cities
The great Robert Altman was one of the most individualistic and downright eccentric American directors. His most head-scratching efforts were when he experimented in genre cinema like this cryptic and baffling work in which three (mainly two) women appear to exchange identities
Directors Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon Ho make an anthology of strange and surreal tales that take place in Tokyo
Cult film from Alejandro Jodorowsky, a surrealistic Western that comes with an incoherent mishmash of symbolism, Zen mysticism and 1960s raised consciousness
This collaboration between Nicolas Roeg and Dennis Potter results in a mind-boggling blurring of dream, reality, symbolism and sexual obsession. A name cast are allowed their heads and go wild
Colin Firth is released from hospital following the death of his wife but experiences a series of reality-blurring hallucinations
Unrelated to Robert Louis Stevenson, this is a bafflingly surrealist parody of a 1940s thriller
Orson Welles’s adaptation of the Frank Kafka novel about a man caught in a nightmare bureaucracy is one of the most visually stunning black-and-white films ever shot
All-star adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel that gets a far better sense of the book’s black ironies than the previous Orson Welles version
LSD film from Roger Corman featuring Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper and full of hilariously surreal and trippily psychedelic moments
The second part of Peter Greenaway’s massive multi-media installation, a surreal mock biography dominated by Greenaway’s fascination with nonsense lists. Gorgeous to look it but does it make for a dramatically engaging a film?
The third and final of Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper films, a sprawling mock biography that is more like a mad multi-media art installation than a film, filled with digressions, endless lists and obscure jokes
The first part in Peter Greenaway’s three-part mock biography, a surreal, sprawling work of mad information overload and obsessive lists
The first film from the inimitable Bill Plympton, a work of bizarre surrealist animation and strange satiric transformations as a man sets out on a journey to find the final line for a tune
Another of Guy Maddin’s surreal kitsch films all delivered in deadpan prose, this boasts more of a name cast than usual for Maddin
David Lynch’s cinematic prequel to his cult tv series critically divides people. Charting the last days of the doomed prom queen Laura Palmer, Sheryl Lee gives a tour-de-force performance
David Lynch’s dive into the dark underbelly of smalltown weirdness became the cult tv series of the 1990s. This is the slightly re-edited pilot issued for theatrical release internationally, which offers an ungainly wrap-up to the proceedings
Little-seen Czech film that sits on the blurred edge of a dream in its hazily surreal view of the world through the eyes of a young girl where the figures around her seem to become vampires that constantly loom with darkly allegorical sexual threat
Obscure film in which director Fernando Arrabal depicts a series of vignettes from his childhood depicting the sadism and cruelty of the Spanish Fascists
A real mindscrew of a film in which Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are a couple who enter a strangely unreal suburb of identical houses and find they can’t leave. Then things start to get really strange.
Not to be confused with the Oliver Stone film, this is a surrealist satire on the George W. Bush presidency
Jean-Luc Godard’s classic of the French New Wave where a couple’s journey into the countryside for the weekend becomes increasingly more surreal and anarchic
Cryptic film about a couple wandering a post-apocalyptic terrain who discover an untouched and still working apartment tower. Less a work of SF than one of baffling surrealism
One of David Lynch’s finest films, with lovers Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern on the run in a road movie that travels through deranged places of the mind and explodes with crazy energy
Strange surrealist New Zealand made film that emerges as a Brothers Grimm fairytale as directed by a David Lynch or a Guy Maddin
Quentin Dupieux’s follow-up to the hilariously culty Rubber, an absurdist film about a man setting out to find his missing dog. You keep expecting something as mind-bendingly hilarious as Rubber but this is more of a mild amusement in the David Lynch-ian deadpan surrealist vein
The third of The Beatles films, in this case an animated work that features likenesses of The Fab Four as they trip through some amazing nonsensical psychedelic visuals